Whisper: Review

Synopsis: Joy is used to hearing Whispers. She's used to walking down the street and instantly knowing people's deepest, darkest desires. She uses this talent for good, to make people happy and give them what they want. But for her older sister, Jessica, the family gift is a curse, and she uses it to make people's lives - especially Joy's - miserable. Still, when Joy Hears a frightening whisper from Jessica's own mind, she knows she has to save her sister, even if it means deserting her friends, stealing a car and running away with a boy she barely knows - a boy who may have a dark secret of his own.


Details: "Whisper" by Phoebe Kitanidis, 288 pages, 4 stars on Amazon.


My Thoughts: First, the cover is amazing. I love the wispy depiction of a Whisper, and the subdued colors are brilliant for this book.


I love urban fantasies, especially when these fantasies don't include vampires, werewolves, fairies, unicorns, dinosaurs (actually, show me a dinosaur book and I will show you eternal devotion), and "Whisper" was right on the dot. Joy's power sounds really neat, but Kitanidis did a good job of demonstrating how every gift can be seen as a curse. When I first started the book, I was thinking how nice it would be to have the ability to hear people's desires, but then I realized that sometimes you're better off not knowing exactly what your friends think about you.


The book was suspenseful and well-written, but I would have liked to learn more about Joy's compulsion to make people happy. A few times, it was mentioned that she gets horrible stomach pains when she fails to help people get their desires, but it never really explained how she deals with this when she's, for example, in a crowd. Also, how does she manage to stop the Whispers from drowning out everything? Aren't people constantly harboring some desire or other?


I also feel like the story could have gone more in-depth with the characters. I never really felt like I got to know Joy or Jamie that well. Other than that, "Whisper" was amazing, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys YA. 4 smiles out of 5!

How to Make a Villain Evil

Naturally, this is a problem that occurs every day. You have the perfect villain. Or... an almost perfect villain. You're just missing the key little details that makes the villain super-duper-awesome in his evilness. For example, Stephenie Meyers did a great job of making her villain evil. There's a picture of him at the right. Oh, oops, was that not the bad guy in the series? I just Googled "scary stalker man in twilight" and that came up.

Here is a list of ten attributes of perfect evilness you can add to make your antagonist convincingly antagonizing because these are obviously completely believable traits that are all undeniably evil:

1. When eating oatmeal cookies and some raisins drop onto the plate, he doesn't eat those poor, lonely raisins. 

2. He sparkles.

3. He enjoys playing Robot Unicorn Attack with the purpose of crashing the unicorn into cliffs, rather than the true purpose, which is to have the unicorn fart rainbows while not getting poked by stars.

4. He is not a follower of this blog, but is reading this post anyway.

5. He is a follower of this blog but never comments.

6. He laughed while reading "The Glass Castle".

7. He laughs when people tell him that they're unpublished, unagented writers.

8. He doesn't think that the fact that 50% of people in the world have a certain parasite in their brain is cool.

9. He changes Asian people on book covers to white people.

10. His internal organs glitter.

What traits do you think  make characters evil? Add on to this list in the comments!

Racism on Book Covers

If you follow a lot of agent and writer blogs, you've probably heard of this controversy, but if not, I'll reiterate. Cindy Pon wrote a novel called "Silver Phoenix", which was an excellent novel I greatly enjoyed. I've read a handful of books with Asian(-American in some cases) characters that either took place in Asia or America, or both, and honestly, I think "Silver Phoenix" is one of the top five I've come across. It takes place in China, has genuinely Chinese characters, and "is inextricably tied to Ai Ling's empowerment through her identity, not just as a woman, but as a Chinese woman." This is the original cover:

It's a beautiful cover, too, don't you think? I mean, the colors are gorgeous. The girl looks strong and powerful, just like the theme of the book, and she's also Chinese. Like she's meant to be. If I hadn't heard of this book and I saw this cover in a library or a book store, I would go over and look at it.

Apparently, the publishing company didn't quite agree. In an effort to make it sell more, they decided to change the cover. Obviously the issue is the Asian girl. Just obviously. So what's the solution? Easy! Let's go and make the Asian girl nice and white and safe! Because, obviously, the sort of people who don't want to read a book with an Asian on the cover are the sort of people who would want to read this story in the first place. This is the new cover:

To be honest, even without considering all the racism and things, I wouldn't like this book cover. It just doesn't look so attractive. The girl is sickly pale, the title doesn't seem to match the cover picture, and just what is that ugly green thing hanging around her neck? It looks like something my dog sneezed out. Oh, and it's not enough to violate one book. They brutalized the sequel's cover as well:

Okay, can you get any whiter and non-Asian that that? The girl looks like she just stepped out of Gossip Girl.

I honestly can't believe this. I'm surprised they didn't ask the author to change her name from "Cindy Pon" to "Cindy Williams". What's next? Taking a book on Martin Luther King Jr. and changing the photo to that of a white man?

What are your thoughts on this?

Crazy Beautiful: Review

Synopsis: In an explosion of his own making, Lucius blew his arms off. Now he has hooks. He chose hooks because they were cheaper. He chose hooks because he wouldn’t outgrow them so quickly. He chose hooks so that everyone would know he was different, so he would scare even himself.

Then he meets Aurora. The hooks don’t scare her. They don’t keep her away. In fact, they don’t make any difference at all to her.

But to Lucius, they mean everything. They remind him of the beast he is inside. Perhaps Aurora is his Beauty, destined to set his soul free from its suffering.

Or maybe she’s just a girl who needs love just like he does.

Details: "Crazy Beautiful" by Lauren Baratz-Logsted, 204 pages, 4 stars on Amazon.

My Thoughts: Now, I happen to like retellings of fairy tales in modern contexts. I also like romances when they're done well and realistically, especially when one  of the love interests is made unattractive to most people for whatever reason, so I really thought I was going to like this story. It sounded quite intriguing and the cover was genius. Unfortunately, I was disappointed.

Overall, "Crazy Beautiful" was written well. Lucius sounded, well, like a boy, which is a good sign considering he is, in fact, male, and I thought that Lauren Baratz-Logsted did a pretty good job of not making his brooding-loner-style too cliché.

However, there were some aspects of the story I didn't like so much. For example, Aurora was meant to be a nice girl who thinks well of most people, but she came off sounding naive or "perfect", like when she narrated, "This school really is just the nicest place!" There was also the part where she was discussing her allowance. Aurora said that she got a set amount of allowance each week, and if she wanted more, she could do chores, but of course, she's just an incredibly nice, sweet girl who loves her dad very much, so she does chores. For free. For the fun of it. Also, she never wants anything or asks her dad to buy her something.

I just have a lot of trouble believing that someone would do chores just because. Maybe once in a while to help out or something, but all the time, every single day? Combine this with the fact that when she saw Lucius had hooks for hands she barely gave it a passing thought because she's just that nice (no, seriously, everyone would have some thoughts about that, be it of pity, sympathy, wonder), Aurora appears to be suffering Character Perfection Syndrome.

One thing that sort of annoys me is when two people that fall in love are utterly attractive. Despite the fact that Lucius blew himself up, and his chest/stomach suffered seriously scarring and he lost his lower arms and hands, his face magically remained completely untouched and as beautiful as ever. I think the story could really have been interesting if Lucius's face became deformed or mutilated or something, which makes me think of a book I read a long time ago (probably five years?) about a girl who was seriously burned in a fire and she was definitely horribly mutilated.

What's hard for me to believe is that people would treat Lucius the way they did at his school. At my school, at least, kids that are disabled to his extent (something sort of noticeable but not really that bad - nothing that makes you eye-burning-hard-to-look-at) are pitied at first, but people usually get over it. In fact, they would become nicer rather than meaner, and sometimes too nice in an effort to not be insensitive. Kids don't usually make fun of disabled kids (in my experience) unless the disabled kid has some sort of mental affliction, in which case s(he) is generally avoided while a few jerks make fun of her or him. It's plausible that Lucius would isolate himself with his brooding personality, but I didn't really get a sense of this while reading.

I also would have liked more detail. Some scenes - especially the one at the party when Lucius tells Aurora exactly what the explosion was - seemed almost rushed, and the author never really explained how Lucius handled everyday things. The secondary characters also seemed rather flat to me, like Deanie and Jessup.

All in all, "Crazy Beautiful" was fairly good and it was entertaining. I may have been over-critical in this review (I did just finish reading "The Handmaid's Tale", so this wasn't very good in comparison), but I give it 2 out of 5 smilies.